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Educational Philosophy and Theory
ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rept20
Space to breathe: George Floyd, BLM plaza and the
monumentalization of divided American Urban
landscapes
Nubras Samayeen , Adrian Wong & Cameron McCarthy
To cite this article: Nubras Samayeen , Adrian Wong & Cameron McCarthy (2020): Space
to breathe: George Floyd, BLM plaza and the monumentalization of divided American Urban
landscapes, Educational Philosophy and Theory, DOI: 10.1080/00131857.2020.1795980
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2020.1795980
Published online: 23 Jul 2020.
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EDITORIAL
Space to breathe: George Floyd, BLM plaza and the
monumentalization of divided American Urban landscapes
The men who talk most about the valor of Lee and of the blood of the brave Confederate dead are those
who never smelt powder or engaged in battle. Most of them were at a table, either on top or under it
when then war was going on …(John Mitchell, Nineteenth Century Richmond City Black Councilman,
quoted in Griego, 2015)
I can’t breathe. (George Floyd, quoted in Oppel Jr. & Barker, 2020, July 8)
Hope is invented every day. (James Baldwin quoted in Adelse, 1970, p. 46)
Introduction
George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police and the large scale national and inter-
national eruption of protest that it provoked put into stark prominence lingering questions
about the political and democratic order in the United States. Black struggle from slavery to the
present has always had generative effect on the broader culture and ethos and the very identity
of the US as an imagined community. It has provoked the most profound questions about our
humanity and identity in a nation that dissimulates its racist and colonial practices in order to
bombastically proclaim itself as a purified model to the world. Indeed, Floyd’s public torture, his
execution by police operating within and outside the limits of the law, is yet another heart
wrenching reminder of Bruno Latour’s provocative claim that even in the case of the most
advanced societies (the United States included): ‘we have never been modern.’(Latour, 1993,p.
10) Once again, it has stirred up the never-fully-sedimentary question of America’s image of itself
to the world. It has particularly laid bare the matter of America’s incomplete modernity and the
uneven and asymmetrical character of race relations and social relations in general within the
country. A central flash point of this contestation has been articulated to city life and, especially
city space, where for the last few decades, as with the Arab Spring, urban dwellers have actively
coordinated their negative judgement on programs of neoliberal gentrification that continue to
threaten their very existential survival in our cities. Indeed, the past decades of urban
‘development’and ‘renewal’have unceasingly accelerated an expulsion and elimination of black
and brown poor from the city’s core. This has made the city the site of permanent contestation;
and as long as a will to dignity in social life remains, permanent revolution. For it is the authors’
firm belief that when the revolution reaches critical mass in the United States it will fume from
the city’s perverse and roiling core.
In what follows in this paper, we therefore seek to draw out a key strand of this continuing
contest over the sutured symbols of modern life in America, and the persistent racialized condi-
tions of Black and Brown people within it, that Floyd’s death and the protest over it have pro-
voked. Specifically, we focus on what the struggle over spatialization that the declaration of the
sanctuary space of the recently declared Black Lives Matter Plaza (BLM Plaza) in Washington D.C.,
right in front of the White House makes plain. We argue that this powerful symbolic reinsertion
of widespread social and civic support for Black struggle back into city space as a response to
ß2020 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia
EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY
https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2020.1795980
Floyd’s death, in an area of the U.S.’most politically prominent real estate, not only affirms the
dignity of Black and Brown lives. It also brings into sharpened focus a struggle for the soul of
U.S. modernity in the articulations of its built space. Such struggle has to be continuously
restarted and sustained as there exists persistent aggravation stemming from the popular
authoritarian impulse to consecrate public space as a platform for the enforcement of a visible
white supremacism. This contestation over the divided landscape of this country emerges out of
the building out and monumentalization of space in the conundrum that is America’s past and
present. Prompted by these developments that are the up thrust of Floyd’s state-licensed mur-
der, this paper urges reconsideration of race and space in relation to the monumentalization of
the American divided landscape. We ask readers to consider what has been codified in America’s
built space. We implore our readers to look forthrightly at the ‘power geometry’(Massey, 1993)
embedded in this landscape, particularly the perpetuation of the subversion of black life and
black pasts into the state-affirmed white supremacy which such monumentalization authorizes
and signifies.
The context: The BLM plaza as a response to black expulsion
The story of George Floyd’s extrajudicial killing at the hands of the police served as a reminder
that since the first moment of settler-colonialism on American soil, the practices of ‘U.S. state
agents’and their precursors have been incessantly devoted to a murderous assault on Black and
Indigenous life and an unrestrained avarice to expropriate all land and natural resources. This
‘reminder’and its popular response exist at two separate poles of America’s struggle with its
hypocrisy, its deluded proclamation of modernity, and its persistent coddling of white supremacy
in the organization and monumentalization of built space. Since our nation’s coming of age ball-
room dance through slavery, expropriation, colonization and widespread murder, Black and
Indigenous struggle over space to breathe, straining like levies against an ever increasing tide,
have always run up against the culturally exceptionalist creed and the heedless notion of
America’s‘friction-free leap’into modernity. American bureaucrats and social scientists, such as
Talcott Parsons and W.W. Rostow, extolled this murderous leap to the world particularly in pro-
grams of modernization, modernization theory, and the proposition of constant development
that needed to be dished out to any countries that could ‘bare the market,’and particularly in
the Global South since the Cold War era (Gilman, 2003).
We start our exploration of the current events regarding Floyd and their significance for our
reappraisal of the orchestration of space in the prominent urban landscapes of this country by
revisiting the bald facts. On that fateful Memorial Day of Monday May 25, 2020, George Floyd, a
46-year-old Black man, was arrested for allegedly trying to pass off a counterfeit twenty-dollar
bill in a convenience store in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The arrest ended in Floyd’s abominable
death, a public and extrajudicial execution, at the hands of the police. The graphic video of
Floyd’s last moments, handcuffed, lifeless, as three policemen sat on his back, while a fourth
closed off his air passage with a knee on his neck, catapulted this rehearsed police killing of
Black men into the volatile media sphere, vaporizing the distinction between old and new media
faster than it takes the state to kill a man. As the clip of this horrifying event burned through
social media and all major news outlets, the whole country erupted anew in explosive and indig-
nant protests against the refrain of police-brutality and state-executed violence. Ricocheting
across the country and indeed the planet, these would become a burgeoning center of gravity
for the Black Lives Matter movement, which the country’s rightwing Chief Executive Officer of
the White House, Donald J. Trump, perplexingly called ‘a symbol of hate’(Donald J. Trump,
2020), evidence of U.S. state-birthed attempts to justify White supremacist violence. Fierce resist-
ance was precipitated the likes of which had not been seen in the United States since the 1960s.
2 EDITORIAL
And with the vehement public mobilization in full swing, the anger over more than 400 years of
White and settler-colonial violence burned in the nation’s capital, Washington, D.C.
With this propulsive pressure, these developments prompted a surprising symbolic recodifica-
tion of space in the nation’s capital, at the behest of a city. On Friday, June 5, 2020, the mayor
of Washington, D.C. commissioned city workers to paint the historic axial-corridor of the District
of Columbia’s16
th
Street with massive yellow, street-wide words: ‘Black Lives Matter (BLM)’
(Willingham, Figure 1). A new space thus emerged in the capital and in the national imagination
of America’s Black community. Registering in wine dens and caviar lounges across Washington
D.C. as a cry from the soul for a new dispensation, certain bastions of White supremacy, such as
the Trump White House, responded angrily, fearful of even the slightest gesture that might
besmirch their hypocritical, ‘Modern’fac¸ade. On the street and across the world’s bus stops,
libraries, park benches and chat rooms, the mayor’s efforts have been read as yet another
‘distraction,’dramatically invoked to dissemble the city’s false promises for action
(BlackLivesMatter DC). While symbolically provocative as a sound-bite for U.S. mass media, which
always works to titillate while clawing the popular narrative back to a comfortable status quo,
the city’s mayor-commissioned-actions were in lieu of real change. The mayor has shown hardly
an inclination to ‘Defund the Police’, a foundational demand for the majority of our recent pro-
tests, and a rally cry that has galvanized and put voice to the real needs of the U.S.’s overpo-
liced, state-violated and underfunded communities. The cry for material change has, and will
always be, the only true call of dispossessed and marginalized communities across the U.S. and
across the world.
A mural may proclaim, but it does not speak like money does. As such, the mayor’s symbol
operates in the political and not the social sphere. It is a statement of one political regime
against another. It is a statement of Democrats versus Trump-Republicans, and it functions more
as an effort for political ‘liberals’to attempt, hopelessly, to disinherit the fraught trajectory of our
nation’s‘Modern lift off’. It is not, unfortunately, any sort of affirmation that the state-funded,
state-mandated and state-executed conditions that caused Floyd’s death, and the death of nearly
Figure 1. “Black Lives Matter (BLM)”written on Disctrict of Columbia’s 16th street corridor, photo coutesy: Stephanie Leedom.
EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY 3
1,100 Americans in 2019 (Higgins and Schoen, 2020), will be coming to an end anytime soon.
Recognizing the mayor’s mural as an attempt to distract organizers from the real work to
be done, protestors ‘reclaimed the message, repainting the mural to say, “Black Lives
Matter ¼Defund the Police”’ (Project for Public Spaces). The mayor and her supporting cast
are not the magicians they may think they are, because our publics know the tricks, and
remember the disheartening game. Protests are not conferences and they are not legislative
sessions. The point is not to create words but to use words to create action. The only
statement that matters is the ‘talk’of money, ‘Defund the Police’; not the words of a
mayor, trying to become a fan seven years tardy. These polarizing events demonstrate the
multi-level semiotic projects that symbol mobilization enacts. While many, and especially
‘white liberals,’applauded the mayor’s efforts (BlackLivesMatter DCa), BlackLivesMatter DC
recognized what it meant for the real social circumstances across America: the mayor was
not about to move forward with any form of ‘abolition democracy’anytime soon (Davis,
2011). The people will have to keep pushing.
At the national level, and certainly the terrain of legibility of Trump and the Republican
party, the attempt of this sign to diffuse social calls for real change remained largely unrec-
ognized. At this level, the sign retained its unabashedly hypocritical register, claiming to
speak truth to power. The historic 16
th
Street runs as a central axis straight southward termi-
nating in the north portico of the White House, Lafayette Square, where the genocidal U.S.
President Andrew Jackson’s equestrian statue bears down from the center with a direct line
of vision (Loring, 2017). Jackson, whose graven image on a twenty-dollar bill created the
opportunity for yet another state-execution, Floyd’s murder; birthed the Native American
genocide in the Southeastern United States, exalted racial discrimination and led a constant
state-supported barrage against anti-slavery and abolitionist movements. That same day that
the mayor commissioned ‘Black Lives Matter’to be painted, June 5, the more than a century
old Lafayette Plaza was officially renamed ‘Black Lives Matter Plaza,’stamped with its own
city street sign. This urban face-lift took place through texts, the removal of iconic statues,
and the renaming of the square—bringing about an extraordinary transfiguration of conse-
crated space in the national register. It established the visibilization of a new political order
struggling to come into being and it thrust forward an oblique questioning of the dispos-
ition of U.S. city space. One political regime to another, playing power games of rhetoric for
the fate of an impending U.S. Presidential election, it was a remarkable example of a stra-
tegic war over signs that has invaded the most privileged exemplar of U.S. hege-
monic landscapes.
As with the mayor’s political act, Floyd’s death reminds us that the U.S. is not modern, and
indeed, all the nation’s murals and monuments are but ‘a thin veil to cover up crimes which
would disgrace a nation of savages’(Douglass, 1852). But its powerful call out to humanity was
the accumulation of the cries of hundreds of years of violation and suffering, and resisting and
surviving. In so doing, it snagged the veil that covers the U.S. claim of a just and fair modern
democratic order. It re-surfaced and re-exposed America’s long fractured society that dwells
within its nationalistic perimeters. Hence, today, Floyd’s last words ‘I can’t breathe’serve as a
reminder of the hypocrisy that shrouds the long-standing aura around Washington, D.C., which
has always stolen its way toward an ‘ideal democratic landscape’and, also paradoxically, never
ceases to be the signature and epitome of colonial power. D.C.’s beautiful landscape was a
design tool that has long served to bury and obscure the nation’s Black history. It has existed as
a glittering codification of White supremacy and fragile hegemony. And now, the BLM plaza calls
this settled narrative of Anglo-American triumph into question at the national level. The plaza
provides a token of recognition for all those who have felt unheard, and it is a sign that the con-
struction of a new ‘abolition democracy’(Davis) is beginning to catch attention in the ballrooms
and boardrooms of the United States.
4 EDITORIAL
Codifying colonial space: Some historical background
The story of the capital’s origin is lodged in the historical backdrop of profound inequality, cal-
lousness and indifference. It is the space where monumentalized white supremacy overlays mark-
ings of an imperial and racial order. Its origins therefore are rooted in paradox, contradiction and
disavowal. Though the nation’s capital ostensibly asserts that the US is a democratic country, the
process of designing DC was never at all democratic. It did not arise from people’s popular imag-
inings; it was instead the choice of George Washington (1732–1799), the first president of the
United States, to make a federal center. He decided that the District of Columbia, the core of the
new government, would be by the Potomac River, 13 miles north of Mount Vernon, his own
8,000- acre opulent estate (Washington, 1919). Pierre Charles L’Enfant, who was recruited from
France to fight in the American Revolutionary War and whom Washington personally trusted,
designed Washington, D.C. in 1791, following a French vernacular (Bowling, 2002). L’Enfant
designed the ornate city in Baroque style, transposing French colonial architectural elements to
the American landscape. This orchestration of built space, its monumental language and super-
imposed circles and axes were directly derived from French colonial design vocabularies of that
time. L’Enfant’s plan was not merely to place the important buildings and the people of power
in strategic locations based on the contours of waterways and shifting elevations, but also to
make a city that could be ‘beautiful’—white washing and pasting over the material fact of the
deep integration of black labor in the construction of the capital center and the presence of
blackness in the capital’s surrounding landscape. Thus, L’Enfant’s D.C. was an exemplary city of
power which later was also emulated in the making of other colonial cities such as Edwards
Lutyen’s New Delhi in India. L’Enfant’s biographer Scott Berg noted that his plan was intended
to make the nation’s capital a city of ‘public walk,’where, ‘[t]he entire city was built around the
idea that every citizen was equally important.’(Berg quoted in Fletcher, 2008). L’Enfant’s idea of
a‘public walk for all,’paradoxically, consecrated brutal asymmetries of inclusion and exclusion
that continue to violate all who bear the burden of this nation since its founding acts of expro-
priation, genocide, colonization, enforced domination, imposed starvation and slavery (Dunbar-
Ortiz, 2014). In making Washington’s dream into reality, L’Enfant sought any good Modern’s
ideal, the purification of space (Latour, 1993). His urban imagination cross-pollinated with colo-
nial times and social contexts of white violence, which promoted the elevation of elite viewers
and, especially, leaders of the community of whiteness, who would be immersed in the disgust-
ingly-privileged visual and spatial pleasure that D.C.’s vistas, urban walks, streets, and landscape
afforded to the heedless colonizers. Thus, blackness was concealed from the visible landscape
spaces, and evidently for the U.S.’s hoax of modernism to continue, it must remain absconded!
In the consolidation of its racial order, today, D.C. is a city of racial inequality. It consciously
elevates its iconic buildings and monuments while defunding the spaces and ignoring the voices
of marginalized communities. Hence the legacy of slaveholdings has always been intentionally
obscured. Consider as a starting point, for instance, Jefferson’s land ordinance of 1785 and the
elaboration of Jefferson’s grid, a landscaping gauge and signature facilitating farmland purchas-
ing rights, ruthlessly interred and erased knowledge of the gender or race of workers who toiled
on such lands. This was the first supremacist codification of landscape infrastructure of United
States. It confirmed a divided and asymmetrical landscape in which white actors owned and
black and brown subjects toiled. This landscaping formula drove the organization, surveying and
carving up of public space and lands across the country and the rectangular design of urban
spaces like gardens, plazas, fountains, and large avenues set in axes that direct one’s gaze often
to the white buildings, and terminates in a focus that often symbolizes the white power and
ownership of public spaces (Carstensen, 1988). Consequently, overall, the proportioning of space
across the country had always been an instrument for a rather ubiquitously divisive landscape,
yet deceivingly symbolizing democracy (the paradoxical myth sustained by Jefferson and others
of the yeoman white farmer working alongside their slaves at the center of the consideration of
EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY 5
the organization of the political order [Hofstadter, 1956]). D.C. therefore sprouted from a domin-
ant landscape imagination focusing on the nation’s founding fathers, the white presidents, and
served to suppress the other side, which is Blackness—a landscape of the Black and Indigenous,
which was ignobly designed by civil-authority to be invisible, hidden, and unspoken. With the
landscape of Presidents’homes and estates designed in neoclassical styles, the White landscape
stretches from D.C. to Virginia, North Carolina, Massachusetts, Tennessee, New York, and spaces
across the West. Virginia’s Presidential estates such as Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello in
Charlottesville, James Madison’s Montpelier, and the Berkley Estate of President Benjamin
Harrison remain close to this governmental core. All these estates, gardens, and public spaces
serve to glorify the leaders of this horrific settler colonial fantasy, fueling the nightmare of
Whiteness, superiority, violence and death across the landscape. In contrast to these late
Presidents who are still celebrated in their glorified monumental cemeteries, the burial grounds
of their Black and indigenous counterparts (their advisers, their workers, their sometimes forbid-
den lovers and help) were too frequently desecrated, erased or suppressed from arising. Black
slaves worked as the oppressed labor on these projects. They were the foundational labor on
which the White House is built! The markers of this labor are now unimaginably whitewashed
out of the public record and the history primers used in schools. Innumerable enslaved bodies
disappeared in the woods of these landscapes, unrecognized and banished; these bodies
demand a desperate ethnographic archeology of Black labor in the construction of Colonial
America. They cry out for a revelation of Colonial America’s torturous past so that we can better
understand its turbulent and hypocritical present.
This banishment of Black and Indigenous labor and subjectivity has horrifically marched
onward from the founding of the settler-country. Its post-Civil War regional bifurcation into
North-South continues in the unceasing present-day expulsions of the Black and Brown poor
everywhere! The North triumphed, and thus slavery ‘ended.’Yet with a bifurcated landscape,
emancipation remained in practice illusory, something of a shibboleth as unofficial slavery, chain
gangs and the prison complex blossomed their terrifying fruit across the nation. Social division,
oppression, and violence continued systematically in structured ways even after the culmination
of the war that many believed would bring harmony and final emancipation from slavery.
America’s White heritage dominated the popular culture, not by accidental gestation but con-
stant fomentation and instigation. This hegemonic fomentation is illustrated in the pedaling of
nationalistic mementos like President Washington’s portrait embedded on stamps (1947) and
President Jackson’s image on the twenty-dollar bill that the formed the pretext for the extrajudi-
cial murder of George Floyd.
By the end of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, coterminous with the con-
solidation of Jim Crow, the landscape of Whiteness grew in its violent prolix. A powerful example
of this can be identified with respect to the monumentalization of space in Virginia. Civil War
monuments were erected in Virginia’s capital Richmond in the concerted effort to consecrate
and make a popular a palpable landscape that would evoke the pre-Civil War past. The great
broader aim, then, was to valorize the Southern heroes of the Confederacy invoking in collective
memory the vainglorious recuperation of those who had lost the consequential internecine war
over slavery. But whose collective memory was evoked? Richmond’s Monument Avenue, as a
case in point, was designed as a tree-lined grassy mall punctuated by statues of Virginian
Confederate veterans of the American Civil War (Whiteness alone was enough to redeem these
contested figures, some might argue, from their betrayal and terrorism against the developing
state). Many of the designs followed the model of colonial streets in England, and the statues
reflect those set in place by the British in Colonial India and throughout its empire as symbols of
pride (Cannadine, 2001). Over the objections from the Black members of Richmond’s City
Council, the City appropriated spaces for the dedication of five monuments of J. E. B. Stuart,
Jefferson Davis, Thomas Jackson, Matthew Fontaine Maury, and that most influential and pro-
vocative figure, General Robert E. Lee, in the time of the Jim Crow era (Griego, 2015; Driggs
6 EDITORIAL
et al., 2001). Colonial Archer Anderson of the Lee Monument Association said that the city had
‘dedicated the Lee Monument not as a memory to the Confederacy, but as a testament to
“personal honor,”“patriotic hope and cheer,”and an “ideal leader”’ (Griego, 2015). But whose
patriotic past is it? And whose pride is enacted at the cost of so much pain and violence?
In their material and discursive elaboration of the vernacular of Whiteness, these equestrian
Confederate statues have become symbols that idolize the racial supremacy, hatred, and racism
of the Confederacy. Inversely, their erection and valorization have come at great cost to Black
and Brown people as these monuments silently abet racial violations through landscapes, assur-
ing further epistemic violence. In their exultation and codification of history’s victors (in reality,
the reborn losers and traitors of the American Civil War) they continue the long trajectory of the
suppression of Black subjectivity, Blackness and Black iconography in the American landscape.
The potency and sovereignty of Whiteness are ensured and established by means of these
statues. Institutional campuses, such as the University of Virginia at Charlottesville, have war
monuments like the statues of Robert E. Lee and Thomas ‘Stonewall’Jackson, which are pro-
tected by state law. To these must be added the litany of paintings of elite property owners,
members of the plantation squirearchy and the celebratory bunting and emblems idealizing the
Colonial era that are scattered across university property, not only in the South but in the North
as well. Many of these figures, often benefactors of U.S. universities, made their profits from
operations in some part of the universe of slavery. These powerfully symbolic figures now often
serve to arouse more racial violations. These emotionally charged spaces impose an excessive
force from the landscape that is comparable to the physical force that the police officers inflicted
on George Floyd and others like Eric Garner, who also died of extrajudicial police chokehold
while arresting him in 2014, and many more.
But the war over signs which monumentalization provokes does not and cannot end with the
‘victors of history.’Such a struggle over the iconography of the past and the present is marked
by ruptures and discontinuities. There is a current of resistance against the grain of the cultural
dominant, after Gramsci, ‘a war of maneuver.’It is the long revolution that was enjoined by
those late-nineteenth century Black Richmond City Council members, like John Mitchell, who
resisted the instalment of statues that would convert ‘white traitors’like Robert E. Lee
into heroes:
The men who talk most about the valor of Lee and of the blood of the brave Confederate dead are those
who never smelt powder or engaged in battle. Most of them were at a table, either on top or under it
when then war was going on …(Mitchell quoted in Griego, 2015)
A bend in the river of history
In the blaze of the current uprising against the police’s incessant brutality, and after the suffering
of so many violations and murders throughout Black history, the outcry provoked by Floyd’s
death successfully soiled the veil shrouding the landscape of blackness. It echoes forward deep
existential yearnings from the long dur
ee of Black struggle against confined spaces and imposed
monumentalization. On June 5, 2020, amidst the context of powerful community indignation,
D.C.’s African American Mayor Muriel Bowser decided to put out nationally visible texts in gigan-
tic letters that attempted to capture the spirit of ‘Black Lives Matter’in the direction of the
White House. And, she would subsequently rename Lafayette Plaza as ‘Black Lives Matter Plaza.’
This iconoclastic gesture certainly strikes a blow against Andrew Jackson’s malignant equestrian
statue from the War of 1812 that was the center of focus of the square, now disowned in the
new BLM Plaza. It also catalyzes on the civic terrain a possible step toward the repossession of
blackness in Monument Avenue vis-
a-vis America’s tragically defined nationalist landscape. On
June 4, responding to the massive outpouring of devasted anger over Floyd’s death, Virginia’s
governor Ralph Northam pledged to remove the iconic statue of General Lee (Figure 3).
EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY 7
This historic decision, if and when implemented, will change the meaning of D.C.’sWhite
nationalist landscape, stinging its Whiteness just a little, or rather indicating the very long road
toward another possibility. Other leaders of Virginia have also committed to taking down the other
four Confederate statues along prominent Monument Avenue, changing the asserted meaning
that has unfortunately been triumphant for more than a century. The thresholds of fences in the
plaza areas without any designer whims may one day turn into a healing landscape of tears and
joy as well (Figure 2). Floyd’s death echoes the call of resistance to state-driven genocide. Such a
call reverberates in the plea not just for justice, but also for the defunding and dismantling of
these technologies and apparatuses of state oppression and violence. The upthrust of these devel-
opments places enormous discursive and material pressure on the dominant forms of monumen-
talization of landscapes in the United States and around world. It puts in historical suspension
those pesky conundrums and hypocrisies that have always afflicted dominant landscape design in
this country. And it brings into view the charge of the light brigade of rag and tag interventions
of designer and non-designer activists punching not only above their weight, but for their right to
be acknowledged. The call of humanity to George Floyd’s memory ripples across space and time,
urging a recognition of the known world by a mixed group of designers and non-designers, old
and young, people of all genders, spheres, modes of being classed and racialized under the banner
of flags, programs for change, varied perspectives and attitudes. Not since the 1960s have public
design processes in city space been placed under so much cultural and material pressure!
Conclusion: Black lives and landscape have always mattered
In the twenty-first century, these landscapes of Whiteness continue with a denial of the history
of all those who have been oppressed. Hence, today, we say, ‘Black Lives and Landscape have
Figure 2. The White House fence and the threshold between the public and the private realm becomes a healing landscape
form, photo coutesy: Stephanie Leedom.
8 EDITORIAL
always Mattered;’and the conditions for social life will continue to be fought for until they are
attained and all systems of oppression, including police and the police-state systems, disman-
tled. From these social, economic, political and landscape interventions, people recognize the
connotative and powerholding part of our social landscape. This change is a tiny step toward
emancipation after a long, suffocating history, and also a reassertion and reclamation against
state-oppression, which will maintain its stronghold as long as systems of state-driven violence,
policing and the willful negligence of violated treaties go unrecognized and unaccounted for.
George Floyd’s last words ‘I can’t breathe,’as a cry of humanity, overturns L’Enfant’s gaze,
decrypts the codified, Colonial landscape and is being remembered in the reclamation of public
spaces, the White nationalist landscapes of D.C. The inequitable landscape of Whiteness is rec-
ognized within historical context and meaning. As protests erupt in DC, their spirit spreads
throughout the world. Many other communities and peoples are calling out for a rendezvous
with and a recognition of history and the myriad disgraceful, supremacist, settler-colonial, and
oppressive landscapes. Today, the masses demand the removal of controversial Confederate
statues across the country; terrible statues saturated with the glorifications of injustice such as
the Robert E. Lee equestrian statue (Figure 3) in Richmond Virginia or the Texas Rangers in
Dallas. In global communities such as those in France, England and Belgium, protestors have
also called for the confiscation of their Colonial statues. In Belgium, protesters have demanded
removal of the statue of the brutal Colonizer, King Leopold II, one of the first ‘leaders’to be
remembered for ‘crimes against humanity’(Williams & Franklin, 1985). In France, protesters
splashed red paint on the statue of the French revolutionary Voltaire who was the owner of
sizeable colonial plantation holdings. And in England, the statue of the slave trader Robert
Millington and the colonialist, Cecil Rhodes, have also been confronted with a similar public
rejection. Hence, shaking the core of our consciousness, which many have long ignored, we
come to a recognition of old forms of hegemonic spatial organization as ‘Black Lives and
Landscape have always Mattered.’
Figure 3. George Floyd’s face overlaid on General Lee’s statue on Monument Avenue, Richmond, photo: Internet, New York
Post June 10, 2020.
EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY 9
What one is strongly reminded of, regarding these developments, is the generative power of
Black struggle in the U.S., its capacity to hold up a torch of scrutiny to the modern condition all
over the U.S. and across the world. This struggle, as we indicated in this article, is right now
being conducted, as it always has been, on many fronts powerfully articulated to space. It chal-
lenges not only the monumentalization of space in which White supremacy and hegemony have
been etched into the landscape, codifying a terrible relationship of settler-colonial powers to ter-
rorized people and exalting despicable White supremacy over the human interests of oppressed
and marginalized subjects everywhere. It also challenges the bombastic symbols of one civic
organization to another. Thus, it dutifully challenges the socially negligible actions by the mayor
of Washington, D.C., who thought that a few marks on the pavement could distract people from
the real work to be done: defund and dismantle all state-driven systems of oppression and vio-
lence. The liquid installation of ‘Black Lives Matter,’made firmer by adding ‘¼Defund the Police,’
and the elevation of BLM Plaza, not only in front of the White House but onto the agendas of
many around world, serve to prod the consciences of those self-satisfied with the ‘purified’set-
tler-relations of ‘Modern’society. They project an alternative agenda of political recognition
against the long dur
ee of White Supremacy across landscapes, practices and state-executed
enforcement in our cities. They remind many to rise up against the grotesque reordering of
space that neoliberal policy making has scripted onto city space and the systems of policing that
desperately hope to maintain it. Despite its innumerable shortcomings, the BLM Plaza serves
notice on a status quo that is no longer tenable.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes on contributors
Cameron McCarthy is Communications Scholar and University Scholar in the Department of Educational Policy,
Leadership and Organization (EPOL) and in the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign. Professor McCarthy teaches courses in globalization studies in education, postcolonialism, mass
communications theory and cultural studies at his university.
Nubras Samayeen is a doctoral scholar at the Department of Landscape Architecture, University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign. She is doing her research on Landscape/Architecture with a minor in Heritage that focuses on
modernist American architect Louis Kahn’s work in Dhaka, Bangladesh and probes modernism’s instrumentality in
creating national identities by homogenizing the cultural ethos of South Asian countries in their post-colo-
nial paradigm.
Adrian Wong investigates media, communication, policy and power as a PhD student in the Institute of
Communications Research and Community Data Clinic at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Raised in
California, he is also trained in classical music and meditation, and serves as Co-President of the University’s gradu-
ate labor union, the Graduate Employee Organization.
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Nubras Samayeen
Department of Landscape Architecture, University of Illinois, Champaign, IL, USA
Adrian Wong
Institute of Communication Research, University of Illinois, Champaign, IL, USA
Cameron McCarthy
Global Studies in Education Division, University of Illinois, Champaign, IL, USA
cameron.cmccart1@gmail.com
EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY 11
